Sometimes when I walk around our river towns it’s like the hopes of our forefathers and mothers still echo from the bridges and in the water, inside the hollows of churches and synagogues. Reflections of past hopes baited along by Babel or Babylon. And I wonder where some people who lived here eventually left to go to chase those hopes further. And how those of us left can turn the echos into prayers and the prayers into action.

These pictures are from 12/26/23 on a quintessentially gloomy day in Rochester, Pennsylvania.